Three Days

Two young men leave the shabby but familiar corner they were born in and go to a strange port city, Kaliningrad. There they meet two girls as far outside everything as they are. Every attempt at talking, at getting close, at understanding one another breaks off halfway; all four are inside the same loneliness. Šarūnas Bartas's first feature, from 1992, proceeds almost without dialogue. Faces, concrete, water, weather: a condition is transmitted instead of a story. The city carries the mark of a collapse that is both historical and human, a place once called Königsberg, destroyed in the war and rebuilt as something else. One of the founding works of post-Soviet Baltic cinema.